Acting Compact: Aligning Design Vision Through A Weekly Check-in Meeting
Min Hu
Every Tuesday morning, the five UX Designers at Yammer get together and talk about projects we’re working on, design challenges, or just general design trends. We’ve been doing this for the past six months, and it’s worked amazingly in terms of aligning design and product visions, as well as helping us all grow to be better designers. Here’s a few of the reasons why.
UX Designers talking about UX things in a cozy setting
The Yammer design team has been growing at an incredible pace. When I joined, there were only four of us—and that was both UX and UI. Aligning design languages and product visions were mostly through hallway chats, looking over shoulders, asking questions like “Hey, Jeff, did you work on this project?” and “Why did you make these decisions?” It’s hard to believe that in just two years the team is now almost twenty and growing. But as we grow bigger, we also experience growing pains. It’s hard for every designer to be kept in the loop on what other designers are doing. A giant meeting where twenty people go around and give updates just doesn’t work as well. But there’s still that need for UX Designers to keep in touch with what we’re working on, since a lot of times we’re working on fundamentally structural things that will eventually effect everybody’s work. These meetings enable us to have small, productive discussions, despite the larger team size.
Aligning functionalities between different platforms
We A/B test our features before shipping and fully integrating them across platforms. This results in increased productivity, as we won’t spend time trying to fully integrate a feature that later proves unsuccessful. Sometimes a feature might be worked on by one designer for the web, only to later be picked up by another designer, since the first designer has rolled off to new project. UX check-ins make sure that designers are aware that a feature they worked on is being picked up by someone else, and gives them the chance to share what they know.
Aligning overlapping features between projects
Our main goal is to make sure Yammer is a simple and easy-to-use product. We rely on one another for information on things happening outside of our own projects. We’re able to identify areas of overlap during our UX check-ins, and we made sure to keep each other in loop. We’re constantly chiming in on each other’s design decisions from a different perspective. And this leads to features that work better together as a whole.
Aligning design language and patterns
When you have half a dozen designers working on a complex product, it’s hard to avoid situations where one person designs a drop-down this way and another person that way. Each design might be the best solution for the project it’s a part of, but as a whole that’s not going to make for the highest quality product. Our meetings are a way for us to talk about these differences and unify our design language. Our Pattern Library came out of this, a great tool we use to document frequently-used patterns. It’s easy to share with the rest of the team, and we have a reference point for future designs.
Being challenged as a designer
Working on a feature by yourself can be isolating. As designers we have a natural desire to share work, challenge, and be challenged. Designer check-ins are good opportunity for that. We can safely talk about our design, get feedback from fellow designers, and be pushed to think bigger and broader. It’s just like being back in school!
And finally: We like to nerd out about design-y things
The small, intimate session makes it easier to initiate discussions that probably only designers are interested in. Design trends, designer jokes, and cat pictures are among the most popular side-tracks in these meetings. When iOS7 came out, we spent an entire session watching the livestream, talking about things we liked or loathed in this shiny new toy.
When a company grows there’s always a danger of losing the connections that can make a smaller company so agile and powerful. With these check-ins, we retain some of that power while still being part of a larger whole. And that makes us—and Yammer—better at what we do.
Min Hu is a UX Designer at Yammer. The biggest challenge in her life is telling apart left and right, but she’s getting better at it every day.
